Courage Decisiveness Tenacity: The Time Is Now

Those are the words that appear on the cover of this year's brochure advertising the World Business Forum which will take place in October at Radio City Music Hall. I've never attended the event but for some reason I get the promotions for it every year. My name must be on a list that gets rented for this mailing. My husband is one of the media people who works there every year and he ususally comes home with some interesting stories.

Here is the brochure's description of the people appearing at the Forum, "the world's most important gathering of senior executives." The event offers "an incredible lineup of brilliant minds, business icons and legendary CEOs." It promises to provide attendees "the energy and ideas to face today's challenges with confidence, no matter how demanding the business climate."

So who are these guys? (And this year, it's almost all guys.) You can certainly hop online for the detailed resumes but here are a few select words and phrases about several of them:

Gary Hamel: The Wall Street Journal called him the world's most influential business thinker and The Economist called him "the world's reigning strategy guru."

Jeffrey Sachs: Time Magazine named him among the "100 most influential leader sin the world." Special Advisor to the U.N. Secretary-General, Professor of Health Policy Management at Columbia University after spending 20 years on the faculty at Harvard.

George Lucas: American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award and recipient of the National Medal of Technology. Founder of one of the world's leading entertainment companies, winner of eight Academy Awards.

Jack Welch: 20-year Chairman of General Electric, where his leadership grew GE's market value from $3 billion to $400 billion; named the 2000 Manager of the Year by Fortune; named Most Admired CEO of the past 20 years by Chief Executive magazine and the World's Greatest Leader in a survey by Fast Company.

T. Boone Pickens. Paul Krugman. And several others, all of whom are very bright, very experienced senior executives who have stories and messages of leadership to share. The presentations carry titles like these: Emerging Multinationals, Leading Transformational Change, A Conversation on Energy Dependence and Economics for a Crowded Planet.

Oh, one more celebrity speaker - another advocate of courage, decisiveness and tenacity no doubt - I wanted to mention: Michael Phelps. His presentation? High Performance.

I'm not kidding. I can only imagine the conversation that took place in the office of HSM Global, who creates this event each year, when they realized their brochure was at the printer or already in the mail announcing the High Performance presentation by Michael Phelps.

You can't make this stuff up.